How Can I Best Manage Duplicates in My Database?

The potential for having duplicate Individual and Organization records increases as your campaign moves forward. Because of this, there are a couple processes in ISP to help you manage them.

ai@ISP

One of many tasks ai@ISP is charged with is combining duplicates while you handle other work. To turn this feature on, navigate to the ai@ISP page under the Tools tab. On the resulting page, slide the Auto-Combine Duplicates option to the right to turn it on.

When it comes to determining what is a duplicate, ai@ISP will not combine records if there is any slight doubt they are not duplicates. Only records that match will be combined overnight. All others will be left for you to manually combine.

Manual Combining

To see the potential duplicates ai@ISP didn’t catch, or if you simply prefer to see for yourself which records are potential duplicates, navigate to the Combine Duplicates page under the Tools tab. To set the criteria for the system to search for duplicates, click the Change Method button at the bottom of the screen. In the window that appears, you’ll see multiple options. These options allow you to be as strict or as loose with the results as possible. 

The Name Match options will determine how it uses the name fields to determine potential duplicates. 

• A+: This looks at all the name fields, including name suffix and prefix. When used with other contact information, these are almost certain to be actual duplicates.
• A: Similar to A+, when used with other contact information, these are almost certain to be actual duplicates but may have problems in rare cases such as Jr. and Sr. living together.
• B: Simple name matching focusing on first and last name. Use carefully, especially without high quality contact information matches.
• C: This uses a very wide net to find potential duplicates. While it is useful for dealing with typos and other name variations, this will also have a large number of false positives.

Start with A+ to get the most conservative results, then move through the rest and make your determinations as you move along. 

It’s also helpful to mark those that aren’t duplicates as Not Duplicates. You can then exclude them from future searches and results.